Common Entrance is looming large and Oliver’s school has sent him home with a very great deal of homework.
He is not under as much pressure as some boys, whose public school places depend on their result, but it is serious enough. His papers will be sent to Gordonstoun, and they will form their opinions of him from the quality of the answers scrawled therein.
We would all rather like it if they felt pleased, rather than horrified, that they had offered him a place.
Common Entrance is hard. It is really hard. I am lost in admiration for the boys who are attempting it, and the staff teaching it. No pressure, son, but your results in this exam could easily cost me a hundred and fifty grand, have you finished your homework? It is a ghastly difficult time, and they all seem to be being astonishingly cheerful and brave, dressing up as girls and bellowing their way through musical theatre last week, and bashing their way through the Spirit Of Soccer tournament this week.
Oliver joined us for coffee in bed this morning, and we discussed this. He is not expecting to have a holiday, with the exams so close. He wants to work.
I was secretly impressed with this, being incorrigibly idle myself, especially when nobody is looking.
We thought that we would endeavour to start every day with a run up the fellside, followed by several hours of homework. I suggested that we work out how many hours he had been asked to do, and visit the village sweet shop.
Windermere has a proper sweet shop, with jars of humbugs and gobstoppers on shelves. We thought that we would purchase one sweet for every hour of homework that he had to do, and every time he had completed an hour he could move a step closer to diabetes. This struck all of us as a most satisfactory outcome. How splendid to feel pleased that your jar of sweets is almost empty.
Mark started the cement mixer going whilst Oliver and I trotted off up the fell to make a start on this admirable plan.
Unfortunately I am still in the throes of sudden-onset early-death man-flu, caught from Mark. I huffed and puffed and coughed, and hence it turned out to be a bit of a walk rather than much of a run, but the views from the top were as splendid as ever, and we felt pink, and pleased with ourselves.
I don’t know what I will do when the flu excuse has worn off. It will mean facing up to exactly how unfit I am, or possibly thinking of another excuse.
When we came down we went to the sweet shop and purchased sixty four sweets.
When we went home he wrote an essay analysing the source materials giving accounts of the murder of Thomas Becket, and ate a Watermelon Bonbon.
Mark built the wall that will go behind the banana plantation in the conservatory.
I packed our things, because we were going out.
Lucy’s school was putting on a play, for which she was assistant stage manager. Since it will be the last chance, and since it was on a Thursday, we thought we would go and see it, and so by three o’ clock we were hauling bags of clean clothes and shoes into the camper van, and soon after that we were on the road.
Nan and Grandad arrived at school not long after we did, and we had a happy reunion in the camper van, only briefly interrupted by the arrival of the security man, making sure that we were still not gypsies.
The play was called Blue Stocking, and was about women trying to be given degrees by Cambridge University.
It was horribly shocking, and I think Cambridge University can never apologise enough for being so dreadful. They should still be apologising now, on the bottom of every letter and page of their website. Instead of ‘yours sincerely’, their letters should all conclude with the phrase ‘and we are sorry that we have been such misogynistic rotters’.
I have never had a letter from Cambridge University, so they might do this already for all I know.
Lucy joined us afterwards.
We were going to go to the pub, but first the school gates, then the pub, were shut, so we stayed in the camper can and had a glass of wine there instead. Then she sloped off back to her room in order not to alarm the housemistress, and we said our farewells to Nan and Grandad and chugged back to our favourite lay-by, which is where we are now.
Never a dull moment in these diaries. They could be subtitled: Great Boarding School Visits Around The North Of England, or possibly, How We Went Broke.
Back to work tomorrow.
